4 - Sunday, December 13, 1987 ~ North Shore News

Bob Hunter

© strictly personal @

WATCHING MIKHAIL Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan on
television’ as they accomplished what would have seemed
like a miracle just a few years ago, I realized we had here an

event that went beyond anyt

hing that has happened in my

lifetime except for one other thing — the eruption of the

first atomic bomb in 1945.

A generation has come and gone
since then with the whole world
living in the after-shadow of that
first massive mushroom cloud.

Since then, it has becn not just
our fate, but truly the fate of the
planet that hung by a thread.

Why was it, as the INF accord
was signed in Washington between
the United States and the Soviet
Union, that 10 million peaceniks
weren’t dancing in the streets?

Instead, all we saw were pro-
testers getting on Gorbachev's case
because he hasn’t changed
everything overnight.

Met, in the broad sense, that is
exactly what he has done.

And as political super-coin-
cidence would have it, Reagan was
ready and the world was lucky
enough to have Nancy Reagan as
Ron’s prompter.

I mention the big picture, which
we all know, by way of introduc-
ing a very small fragment of the
picture, which was my own experi-
ence of those dangerous years,
when fingers were never more than
inches away from the button.

1 was fucky enough to have
missed: the. worst: moment, when
John Kennedy challenged Nikita

Khrushchev to a standoff over-

Cuban missiles. I happened to be

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on a Yugoslavian freighter bound
for Havana and was turned aside
by the U.S. blockade.

Out of radio contact, | didn’t
find out until a month later that
we had gone to the brink of nu-
clear war, and were only spared
because a stocky, balding Russian
peasant had the common sense to
step back, leaving the field to his
machismo-crazed young adversary.

This week is the first time the
horrible momentum of the race to
Armaggedon has been not only
halted but turned around, however
slightly.

A miracle, indeed. But not en-
tirely a surprise.

Going back through my files and
clippings, I find that there has
been a sense in the air of a change
coming for a while now.

I have been personally feeling
optimistic — and putting it in print
— for nearly half a decade.

Up until 1983 I had recurring
dreams of nuclear war or its
aftermath. The last such dream
occurred a month before the airing
‘of The Day After, no doubt stimu-
lated by advance hype around the
TV series about doomsday.

Whatever the specific reason, it
was as though a boil had been
lanced in my own psyche, or a

kind of group media therapy had
been experienced. What you could
fairly call-a change in mass con-
sciousness occurred in the United
States, as it had already done in
Western Europe.

As fuck or God's will would
have it, there were changes al the
top in the Kremlin.

My own glimmering belief that a
breakthrough would occur in arms
race negotiations first solidified
back in 1984. 1 wrote a column in
the Nov. 2 edition of the News
under the screamingly optimistic
headline DOOM DOESN’T
LOOM.

“‘As an old doom-and-gloomer,
I must admit to being rather
astonished at how much of a tur-
naround there has been in attitudes
about the fate of the earth in the
last decade.”

I thought I had detected a
*‘new-found optimism, rather than
despair.”’

This was not particularly in ac-
cord with hard-boiled political re-
ality at the time, what with
American Pershing I] and Cruise
missiles about to be deployed in
West Germany to match the Soviet
SS-20s aimed at Western Europe.

It would soon only take six
minutes for a U.S. missile to hit
Moscow. .The Russians responded
by vowing to move their missile-
tipped nuclear submarines in closer
to American shores.

Doom, as a general trend-line,
loomed tangibly closer, if
anything. ;

Yet my own weird mood of irra-
tional optimism persisted. By July
26, 1985, I was writing in this
space:

“My opinion is that we gave
probably inches past the worst of
the nuclear crisis, and that’ the
distinct possibility looms, not of
doom, but of a Golden Age.”’

By then, of course, there was
some respectability in the idea of
nuclear disengagement. Henry

Kissinger announced in Vaucouver_

that he. thought there was less
chance of a nuclear exchange than
at any time in the last 20 years.

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As of this past week, we have
now definitely, collectively, step-
ped back from the brink. The
die-hard pessimists were wrong.
Doom isn’t inevitable. You can't
blame your neurosis on the end of
the world any longer.

Congratulations all around.
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